The Senate

Your Honour, I rise to a point of order regarding the admissibility of Motion No. 82. It runs against the procedural principle that a complicated question, where a motion contains multiple propositions, should be separated into individual questions so that each part can be debated and voted on as separate matters.

Your Honour, in the case before us, we have a disposition motion that proposes to govern the legislative process of Bill C-16, Bill C-25 and Bill C-30.

We have just received and read Bill C-16 and Bill C-25 earlier today. Bill C-30 is not even before us. These are three distinct issues that are contained in one disposition or programming motion. The timelines for governing each bill are different. The topics of each bill are different.

Bill C-16 is entitled An Act to amend certain Acts in relation to criminal and correctional matters (child protection, gender-based violence, delays and other measures).

Bill C-25 is entitled An Act to amend the Canada Elections Act and to enact An Act to change the names of certain electoral districts, 2026.

Lastly, Bill C-30 is entitled An Act to implement certain provisions of the spring economic update tabled in Parliament on April 28, 2026.

These bills are not thematically similar. They are distinct legislative proposals. Accordingly, they cannot be subject to a single motion.

Before I begin discussing this principle in greater detail, I want to elaborate on what my objection is about, and, more importantly, what it isn’t about. I do not take issue with the substance or intent of the motion before us. Whether we call it a “disposition motion,” “programming motion” or “scheduling motion,” it is a recognizable tool that the government can use to conduct its business. The reason why there are few precedents governing its use is that, until recently, it has been relatively rare.

In her Speaker’s ruling on April 28, 2004, Speaker pro tempore Pépin, in response to a question of privilege by Senator Cools regarding a disposition motion, said the following:

Since the Senate has complete control over the disposition of the motion, it maintained its fundamental privilege to determine its own proceedings.

Your Honour, again, I am not disputing the contents but rather the form.

On November 5, 2013, Speaker Kinsella noted:

Dividing a vote . . . is a rare practice. In the Senate, we do not have any known cases of using this parliamentary practice.

In this case, “rare” meant that there are few examples because the Senate normally does not have motions covering multiple items that could be separated. Until 2013, no senator requested that a vote be divided.

Your Honour, for the benefit of the chamber, I will read the relevant passage in the fourth edition of the House of Commons Procedure and Practice, specifically Chapter 12, section 12.49:

When a complicated motion comes before the House, the Speaker has the authority to modify it in order to facilitate the decision-making of the House. This may happen when a motion contains two or more distinct parts, each of which could form a separate motion. When any member wishes to examine propositions separately, they may request that the motion be divided and that each proposition be debated and voted on separately. The final decision, however, rests with the Chair.

Although rather rare, the matter of dividing a complicated motion has arisen in the House on several occasions. The first such case dates back to 1964, when a member raised a point of order to request that a government motion be divided into two or more distinct propositions. In his ruling, the Speaker divided the motion into two separate motions for debate and voting purposes. Since then, the Speaker has given different rulings on the division of a motion. In some cases, the Speaker has chosen to divide the motion for voting purposes only; in another case, the Speaker divided the motion so that different propositions would be debated and put separately.

The clearest guidance we have is from November 4 and 5, 2013, when Senator Nolin requested that the Speaker divide the question related to the suspension of three senators into three separate votes. At the time, the Senate had no procedure governing complicated questions.

Senator Kinsella considered the precedents of the House of Commons and found:

Honourable senators, in my consideration of Government motion five, I note that it deals with a single broad topic — the suspension of three senators — but also that it has been drafted in such a way that it can be split for the purposes of voting. It thus meets the basic criterion.

The Speaker then divided the question for the purposes of voting into five distinct but separate votes. Although they dealt with the same thematic topic — the suspension of senators — the motion itself addressed specific issues that were related to it.

Your Honour, my request is distinguishable from that of Senator Nolin.

I am requesting not only separate votes, which would clearly be appropriate in this context, but to also divide the motion for the purposes of debate.

What we have is a situation that isn’t specifically provided for in our Rules.

Rule 1-1(2) provides:

In any case not provided for in these Rules, the practices of the Senate, its committees and the House of Commons shall be followed, with such modifications as the circumstances require. The practices of other equivalent bodies may also be followed as necessary.

What this means, Your Honour, is that this current situation is novel. It does not matter what has happened in the past regarding complicated questions in the Senate.

In the past, any complicated questions have not necessarily warranted an objection by an individual senator. We are faced presently with a new situation where I, as a senator, am objecting to the form of this complicated question. I am asking for guidance on how to proceed.

Our Rules state we are obligated to look at the House of Commons and base our own practices off theirs, subject to any necessary modifications.

Further, Your Honour, a similar approach regarding complicated questions is referenced in the United Kingdom’s Erskine May in paragraph 20.27. A summary of the British origins of the practice can be found in the Canadian House of Commons Speaker’s ruling from June 15, 1964.

The rulings of former House of Commons Speakers Peter Milliken and Andrew Scheer offer guidance.

In a ruling from October 17, 2013, Speaker Scheer captures the essence of Speaker Milliken’s ruling from October 4, 2002:

While previous Speakers have been faced with similar requests to divide motions, they have seldom done so, something Speaker Milliken, on October 4, 2002, at page 299 of Debates, remarked upon when he stated that “the Chair must exercise every caution before intervening in the deliberations of the House”. In that instance, Speaker Milliken did in fact determine that a motion contained three different proposals. In that case, the broad purpose of the motion was the “resumption and continuation of the business of the House begun in the previous Session of Parliament”. Accordingly, Speaker Milliken took the view that the first two proposals, which dealt with the reinstatement of business from a previous session, should be debated together but each get a separate vote. The third proposal, which concerned travel by the Standing Committee on Finance and was not found to be “strictly speaking, a matter of reinstating unfinished business”, became a separate motion. In making this decision to allow a separate debate, Speaker Milliken also stated, “Our usual practice is to adopt travel motions on a case-by-case basis”.

More importantly, Your Honour, is that in the House of Commons, when they use their version of a disposition motion — a programming motion — it only applies to one piece of legislation at a time. The only exception is where the House of Commons revives items that have died on the Order Paper due to prorogation.

In this scenario, the House is not being asked to expedite the legislative process but restore bills to their prior stage. The importance of the ironclad one bill per programming motion is simple: It ensures that the House can be seized with a single issue at a time when performing its constitutional role of scrutinizing legislation or, in the words of Speaker Milliken, to avoid:

. . . circumvent[ing] the rules and practices governing the legislative process in a manner prejudicial to the proper consideration of proposed legislation.

In a Speaker’s ruling from March 29, 2007, Speaker Milliken, when discussing an opposition motion programming the passage of multiple bills in a single motion, offered this important commentary:

The Chair has been unable to find any examples even of Government-sponsored multi-bill motions being moved after due notice, with the exception, as noted earlier, of motions to reinstate legislation at the beginning of a session. Even in these cases, the authority of the Speaker to divide a motion is unquestioned.

In other words, Your Honour, multi-bill motions are simply not done in the House of Commons, and if they were, the Speaker would have the duty to divide not only the vote but also the debate.

I am well aware that senators wishing to argue against this point of order will point to the last sentence on page 110 of Senate Procedure in Practice, which says:

An order for the disposition of business can deal with a single item of business or with a number of items of business at once.

They would then refer to footnote 214, citing an example from June 21 and June 22, 2007, when the Senate disposed of five government bills at third reading.

There was also a built-in safety mechanism where if the leadership of any group objected, the motion could no longer be moved. It would be similar to asking for leave under our Rules to dispense with the normal procedures and processes. However, these examples offer no precedential value for a basic reason: No one objected to the complicated question.

If I may, Your Honour, I will conclude by commenting on why it is important for each bill to be debated and divided on its own disposition motion. The government motion can always be subject to time allocation. The consequence is that once time allocation is adopted, no further amendment to the motion can be moved. This means that once that happens — and I remind you that time allocation can be moved only after one day’s debate — senators can debate the merits of a disposition motion but are deprived of changing it.

Today, we only have 3 bills under this motion, but there would be nothing stopping a government in the future from including 5, 10 or even the entirety of the government’s legislative agenda, even before any bills arrive in this chamber.

To paraphrase former Senator Fraser when discussing the 2013 precedent:

No one forced the government to present one motion to cover all three . . ..

— bills.

There was no immediate, apparent necessity to do that . . . One speculates that the reason for doing it was so that the government could move to impose one time allocation motion instead of three.

A senator can only move one amendment on a motion. Given that legislative scrutiny and oversight are our paramount duties, should a senator request that a complicated question be divided on both the motion and vote, you have a duty as a guardian of our rights and privileges to do so. In the situations in the House of Commons where the Speaker declined to divide debate in a programming motion, they related to matters unrelated to the multi-bill passage of legislation. Simply put, multi-bill disposition motions are foreign to the practices of the House of Commons and are, therefore, foreign to the practices of the Senate, should a senator ask that a complicated question not only be divided for the purposes of voting but also debate. That is why, Your Honour, I am asking for you to do so.

Thank you.

Your Honour, I want to be very brief on debate.

Honourable senators, I was quite surprised when I heard that motion last week. I actually leaned in to try to listen to paragraph after paragraph, and I wondered how that was going to affect our work at the Standing Senate Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs. I sit on that committee. I understood that Bill C-16 was coming and that Bill C-25 was there, and it was difficult to figure out how we would organize our work. It felt almost like an omnibus motion, even with just three bills.

I am not a long-time senator. I am five years in. What does that make me — a teenage senator? However, this was novel to me, so I am very interested in getting some guidance on this type of motion, particularly when Senator Prosper raises the possibility of this becoming something more frequent with more bills. It raises some concern.

We are here to give our best advice to the other place, and should they choose to ignore that advice, so be it. We have shown that we respect what the other place does with our amendments and our advice; we go on to do the next thing and to review the next bill.

However, please give us time to give the other place our best advice. On the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee, we have clearly indicated that we need more time to do so on Bill C-25.

So, I would like to add my voice to Senator Prosper’s to ask for guidance on complicated questions and on bringing some clarity so that we can schedule our work appropriately. Thank you.

Honourable senators, on this point of order, I intend to be brief. Initially, I didn’t even intend to speak to it.

First and foremost, we are spending hours and hours on how we need more time to debate legislation and how it’s critical to the nation. However, we’re spending hours and hours on procedure instead of on debating the substantive legislation that affects the nation.

One rule that I learned in this place a long time ago is this: Rules, precedents and points of order are all very good, but this chamber is the master of its destiny. That’s why, with leave, we can do things with motions; we can overrule certain procedures, precedents and rules.

I have been in this place for quite a long time, and I can tell you that, regardless of what government is in power, organizational motions and forms of time allocation have been used in the past and will continue to be used in the houses of Parliament. I was a member of a government. Senator Carignan was government leader when we would move organizational motions with a multitude of bills in those motions. Of course, Senator Downe and the Liberals at the time would tear their shirts in indignation, light their hair on fire, have procedural motions and all the rest of it. Sometimes you won those points of order. Sometimes you lost. With me in the chair, you actually won a couple.

The truth of the matter is that it’s not something that is unusual. It’s also not unusual that, at this time of year, we sit down with leadership groups and try to come up with an agenda that’s oriented toward common sense and tries to appease the agenda of the House. Again, I remind people all the time that the House of Commons is the master of democracy in Parliament. It is incumbent on them to face the electorate every few years, to face transparency and to face judgment day.

We are here to support their process, and there are a bunch of bills that didn’t make the priority list. I wish some of them had. I’m sure the government leader wishes some of them had as well — or that some of them hadn’t. That’s irrelevant.

All leaders sat down, I think, three weeks ago. We came to a general consensus on what the important bills were. The truth is that the government, in the end, probably snuck in one or two. That is their prerogative — they were elected — and it’s our prerogative to do the work in a reasonable period of time.

Again, colleagues, I can tell you this as Leader of the Opposition: Even with the time frame we’ve put into place here, if there is anyone who should be screaming because there isn’t enough time for democracy to speak, it should be the opposition.

And I think this agenda is a little bit ambitious, but I think we’re up for the task. If we’re not up for the task, well, we should make time for legislative work and less time for procedural work.

And, Your Honour, I want to say this: It is also incumbent on the chair. You can exercise your right to do what you see fit. Thank you.

Thank you, Senator Prosper, for bringing up this important question.

Thank you to all the senators who participated in debating this point of order.

In order to have a clear pathway to deal with these three bills, I will consult with the clerks. Therefore, I will suspend the sitting, and we will have the bells ring for 15 minutes to call in the senators when the ruling is prepared.

Honourable senators, I am now prepared to rule on the point of order raised by the Honourable Senator Prosper.

Senator Prosper argues that Government Motion No. 82 constitutes a complex question, and as such should be split for both debate and vote. In doing so, he points to statements by Speaker Kinsella in November 2013. He also notes that our rules and procedures do not explicitly provide for this, but references procedures and practices from the House of Commons.

As I noted in my ruling when I received a request to split a vote in June 2025, “there is only one known case of the Speaker having done this, as addressed in a statement by Speaker Kinsella on November 5, 2013. At that time the Senate was dealing with a quite complicated substantive motion that dealt with a number of very distinct issues. The motion was drafted in such a way that separate votes were feasible.”

In the November 2013 case, the Speaker agreed to divide the question concerning the suspension of three senators. The adoption of that motion as drafted would have been final — there would not have been any further opportunity for debate or amendment.

In the case before us, however, the motion deals with timelines for the consideration and disposition of three bills. Should this motion be adopted, each bill would still be debated, considered, and ultimately voted on individually. It is not the adoption of the three bills together that is being dealt with in this motion, but the timelines by which the Senate will take its ultimate decisions on these bills.

Two questions therefore arise: is this a complex question, and can this motion be easily divided? In response to the first question, I must again be clear on what it is we are being asked to determine: it is the timelines for the Senate to dispose of these individual legislative measures, not the adoption of the legislative measures themselves. In that sense, the motion represents a work plan for the Senate to consider. I would also cite Speaker Kinsella’s statement of November 4, 2013: “As long as we are satisfied that we know what we are voting on … there is no need to divide even the most complicated of questions.” In this case, as I already noted, the issue before us is clear — the government is proposing timelines for the Senate to dispose of three bills. The bills impacted and the timelines proposed are clear, and senators will retain the right to debate, amend and vote on each individual bill separately and at every stage.

The other question is if this motion can be easily divided? As Speaker Kinsella noted in his statement of November 5, 2013, this process “can only be done if the motion contains two or more distinct propositions that would, if decided separately, be coherent.” While the motion before us does provide separate timelines for each of the three bills, it also has more general provisions for the consideration of all three bills, and cross-references between the provisions on each bill, such that separating this motion would render it incoherent.

Before concluding, I would like to address questions raised as to whether this matter was raised at the first opportunity. While our rules require that questions of privilege must be raised at the earliest opportunity, there is no such requirement for a point of order, which can be raised at any time the matter is still relevant.

For these reasons, I do not believe that there is a complex question, or that the motion can be divided for debate or vote. Debate on the motion can therefore continue.